


You're Together Because He Helped You Break

by CarbonCopy



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Arthur contemplates the past, M/M, Second person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 18:46:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarbonCopy/pseuds/CarbonCopy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During a late night while preparing for a job, you wind the clock in your living room and think about what's happened since your father hung it there when you were a little kid. This includes your habit of drawing on anything you can find, how you met Cobb and Mal, the first time you met Eames, the loss of people you love, and the breakdown that finally made everything perfect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Together Because He Helped You Break

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I gave Eames the first name Derek. My sister and I actually debated what his first name should be for almost a week.

You sigh as you read the information on the screen about your target for the third time, trying to make sure you absorb and read _everything_ because the last time you didn’t, someone got shot. The clock on the wall ticks away in the same fashion it has since your father hung it there so long ago. You can’t remember when it was, how old you were, but you remember him laughing as your mother scolded him for swearing a blue streak in front of you because he hit his thumb with the hammer. You remember it was summer, which was your favorite time of year - and still is though you’re now terrified of bees (that is one failed extraction you’ll never get over or live down) - but not what month. Your mom held you up and your dad showed you how to wind it and start it ticking, because it’s a very old clock with a pendulum and a key to wind it. Actually, you should wind it now, because it’s slowing down again.

For some reason, as you wind it you remember when you were in high school and your head was full to bursting with ideas for drawings of what you now create. Paradoxes and the levels of dreams. But so often, you would lose those ideas long before they had a chance to grace a piece of paper. Any kind of paper would do, really, even your Pre-Calc assignments. That’s how you met Dom _and_ Mal, though on two very separate occasions. Dom noticed your work one late-spring afternoon when he was busy being “too cool to do this junk” (his words, not yours) and commented, totally blown away. Mal, on the other hand, you met during the autumn of your second year in college.

You still remember it, entirely because it was the most awkward first impression you’ve ever made. She was minding her own business and handing out flyers for a study group when you had an idea. You had learned to perpetually have a pencil handy, always tucked behind your ear. But Dom had stolen your last piece of unused paper - in fact, you were on your way to the bookstore on campus to buy some more. Just as you met her eye and returned her polite smile, you had a somewhat familiar idea for a picture - you dismissed the feeling of familiarity because it usually meant you’d remembered an idea you’d never put down on paper - and hurriedly grabbed the flyer she offered, then dropped to your knees on the pavement by her feet and bent over the blank side of the paper. By the time you finished, a crowd had gathered around the pair of you and the sun had set (you hadn’t noticed that or the orange cast of the lamplight, far too focused). You blushed and stood up, tucking the pencil behind your ear.

“Arthur Collins,” you introduced yourself quietly to Mal. “And I am so sorry, you must think I’m absolutely insane!”

“Mal Miles,” she smiled. “And no, I think you’re talented. I want you to show this to my dad!”

“What?”

“He’s a professor of Architecture at a university in Paris.”

“What?”

“You’ve got talent. Your art could become somebody’s reality.”

That was how you wound up becoming an architect. And then, oh God. Just after you graduated, in July, you met Derek Eames in Reno, Nevada. He had the most beautiful eyes and mouth you’d ever seen and an accent that made your knees buckle. You’d known you were gay for a long time, and you had never been in the closet since the afternoon you found out. But this was crazy, and you regretted ever having thought he was even potential boyfriend material. He gambled and forged and God he was too beautiful to hate him for anything. He scared you, though. The very second time he ever saw you, his eyes lit up like Bastille Day and his whole being seemed to convey a kind of affection you’d never received before. And you still ached inside because your mom just died. So you pushed him away, tried not to notice your heart breaking as the light went out of his eyes when he realized you weren’t just playing coy with him.

For a while, you didn’t think about Eames after that, because you got involved in dream-sharing. But your first extraction job, you nearly quit on the spot when you saw that you’d be working with Derek Eames. He wasn’t cold to you, like you’d expected he’d be. He was flirty. You could see underneath it though that he was still hoping that one day you’d want him. You cried for a week and lost ten pounds after that job. Then, working with him was a routine. And he’d pretend to be a flirt and you’d pretend you weren’t dying inside. Soon enough, you’d even fooled yourselves. Then you had that blow-up of a fight and you went to Alaska and he went to Mombasa and for two months you avoided using your cell phone, because right under the name “Dom” was simply “Derek”.

Dom called you up, worried as Hell and then offered you a job and residence in Arizona. You agreed and when you got there, the first thing you did was change the name “Derek” on your phone to read “ZEames”. You would never have to see his name again, since every time you tried to delete his number, your heart ached and you cried and woke up with a headache and your cell phone still scrolling the same number across the screen. The second thing you did was get absolutely shit-faced drunk and you woke up the next morning with a red and white poker chip tattooed on your left shoulder-blade with the name of a certain hotel in Reno inscribed in the middle. That was when you started wearing the suits.

Then came Mal’s suicide, followed by the inception job. You saw Derek again and you nearly told him everything, but you never had the opportunity because someone else had a question or needed your attention. You almost told him before you went under, and before you put him under in the second layer of the dream, and when you were the only two left in the first-class section of the plane when it landed. And you watched as he gave you a flirty grin with an obvious undercurrent of sadness and left the baggage claim to go wherever he intended to go next. Your dad died only two weeks later and you spent seven months wandering around your childhood home in a daze, where you felt nothing. You barely ate, because you couldn’t feel when you were hungry. You only slept when you passed out from exhaustion. But the whole time, you cried. You didn’t know where to go from there, in the home that held your memories of the lives of the people who had died and left the house to you.

You had expected the banging on the door to be Dom or maybe Ariadne, worried sick about you because you hadn’t even answered their calls in your then-automatic fashion in two days. But there stood Derek Eames. You just broke then, sank to your knees and sobbed, your arms wrapped around yourself. You told him everything, from the way you felt when you met him to why you’d been so cold and that when you’d just gotten into dream-sharing and still had natural dreams they had always been about him, sometimes sexual and sometimes domestic. He just held you that whole night and told you everything was going to be okay and you must have begged forgiveness a billion times. Every time, he said he forgave you. You just couldn’t believe it.

He took care of you and helped you get back to the person you’d been before your mother died. You both fell in love with one another all over again and by the next summer, he’d moved in, because like _Hell_ were you giving up this house. One day, you looked Derek straight in the eyes and demanded a sheet of paper and a pen. He was a little scared because you hadn’t been the person who drew amazing places anymore by the time he met you, your mind had still been reeling from the sudden and unexpected death of your mom. But he gave you what you asked for and you drew.

For a moment, you didn’t realize why this seemed so familiar, and then you shot out of your chair at the breakfast table and pulled two folders out of the filing cabinet full of your school papers from grade school through college. Pulling out a blue sheet of paper and a white sheet with numbers printed in black ink under your pencil art, you stared at them. Then you put the white sheet down, moved the blue sheet next to it and the sheet you’d just used next to that. Tears welled up in your eyes and Derek was instantly looking at the pictures over your shoulder. They formed a panorama of the same living room that you knew was just a room away, where an old clock was chiming out eight in the morning. You explained it to him and he simply nodded. That was four years ago.

You close the door that protects the pendulum and return to the computer, rereading the files. You hear movement and look up. Leaning on the doorframe is your lover and husband, Derek Eames. He smiles at you and points to the small clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

“Come to bed, Darling. Four years with you and now I can’t sleep unless we’re cuddling,” he says in that still-knee-buckling accent.

“Sorry, I was thinking.”

“Well, you’ll have all the time in the world to think when the sun comes up. For now, you need to sleep.”

He’s right of course and you promise to be right there as soon as you get the computer shut down. He gives you a look that says he’s not sure whether he believes you or not, but nods and goes to your room. You begin shutting down the computer and baby-sit it until you know it’s shut down properly - the thing is so old you can’t remember when you bought it - then get ready to go to bed. As you leave and move to turn out the lights, you can’t help stopping and gazing around the living room.

To the left of the clock is a picture of your parents from before you were born, and to the right is a nearly identically posed picture of you and Derek. Underneath the clock is your very odd panorama, framed gently for your wedding present by Dom and Ariadne. You smile and turn out the lights, and from the darkness, the clock sounds out that it’s two in the morning. The sun is already coming up through the East-facing bay window. The West-facing counterpart is in the dining room. You settle into Derek’s arms and whisper words of love before you feel him trace what he knows by heart is the lettering of that tattoo you got when you were drunk on your first night in Arizona. You respond by pressing your lips gently to the tattoo just above the left half of his clavicle. It’s a pair of red dice with white spots and underneath, it reads “Scorching Dry Heat”, which is a reference to the very first words you ever said to him, back in Reno.

Yes, you love the summer.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first post here. I'm still not entirely sure how much I like it, but I like it better than the stuff I posted over on FanFiction a few years ago. Depending on response to this story, I might do another of these for Derek.
> 
> EDIT: Due to the comments of readers, I changed the tags. I removed the comments because I changed the tags and the comments would've looked odd with the new tags. Thanks to both of them, for pointing it out.


End file.
